Xark!

Just plain scary

This is written to have strong emotional impact, but is definitely something to think about:

Bruce Schneier's latest Wired essay:  Our Data, Ourselves.

21 accents

Actress Amy Walker does a bunch of different accents in this video, including one that purports to be from Charleston, SC. It's the only one that didn't sound quite right to me.

A big day for cartooning

Today was my day to get ahead on my caption contest cartoons through the middle of June...

"Gentlemen! I believe that your investigation will determine... THAT THIS MAN WAS KILLED BY AN ENORMOUS PROJECTILE!"

"Actually, I bought us tickets to the ballet so we could have a little private time."

"On second thought, maybe it's time we reconsidered our priorities."

"You think you're very clever, don't you?"

'You don't know what you're talking about'

Chris Matthew's talk-over-the-guest interviewing style on Hardball has always been nails on a chalkboard for me, but this might be the first time it ever came across as utterly appropriate. Kevin James, a right-wing talker from California, came on the show Thursday after President Bush's Knesset speech to talk about Israel, appeasement and Barack Obama, and his aggressive platitudes prompted Matthews to run a history check on his ass.

It immediately becomes clear that James doesn't have a clue who Neville Chamberlain was, or what happened in Munich. Partition of Czechoslovakia and dialog with Palestinians the Iranians? "It's the same thing!" he says.

What follows might be the greatest smack-down of a self-important, shallow idiot ever witnessed on national TV. Listen to the high-school essay-test evasion ploys and the empty wingnut counter-attack maneuver ("Thirty-eight or 39, Chris? Which one do you want?").

You've got to be morally and intellectually bankrupt if Tweety makes you look small in comparison.

Friday Morning Paranoia

Customs agents in the US, UK and several other countries can search your laptop, your cell phone, your PDA, etc.   

Here's an essay on dealing with it.

David returns to Europe

(from David Quick)...

After a short tour of the United States, Michaelangelo's statue of David has returned to Europe...

(Click through to see...)

Obama and "consolidation" of power

Matt Stoller wrote an excellent piece last week about Obama's quiet consolidation of party and grassroots power, based largely on the nominee-in-waiting's unprecedented ability to raise money.

I think the Stoller piece marks the beginnings of our noticing the forest instead of the trees: While Obama opponents continue to paint his success as some Svengali-like personality cult, a more grounded view reveals a hyper-competent modern organization that has managed to integrate multiple campaign efforts (fund-raising, various levels of community organizing, mass media, alternative media,  online, intra-party relations, "the ground game" and yes, the candidate himself).

To me, Obama's campaign represents a great selling point for his abilities as an executive, and I have no doubt that political scientists will be exploring its practices and principles as the first major case study in 21st century American politics. But to Democrats with a long-time stake in the party, Obama's success is both welcome (who wants to live in the wilderness forever?) and intimidating.

Why the angst? Here's a commenter on Stoller's follow-up piece:

The anti-authoritarian impulse common in a lot of liberals, and which I share, is definitely visible on both the pro and anti Obama sides.

Re: the movement, from glancing at other blog comment threads, I'm reminded of a very gut-level, "It's happening without ME, I am NOT included....therefore they will screw ME...."they" have decided I'm worthless...I don't want anybody having power over ME/My favorite orgs" self-absorbed reaction.   

And this reaction is disguised in a "but what I really care about is the party" pose.  It's really a paranoid fantasy.  It's all fear.

"Lies we tell kids"

I'm a big Paul Graham essay fan.  I don't always agree with him but I do consistently find his essays very thought provoking and often learn something new about myself or the world by thinking about them.

Here's his latest:  Lies we tell kids.

It's not only useful if you're interested in kids but also if you're interested in figuring out how the lies you were told growing up might still affect you.

Why? Because O'Reilly is just a dick

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Jesus. Will somebody please give this jerk a loofa and a Prozac?

9 a.m. Tuesday UPDATE: It didn't take 24 hours before someone (in this case, some guy in L.A. who goes by RevoLucian) turned the O'Reilly Freakout into a dance remix. I gave up on trying to login to MySpace Music to get the download, so here's the Oliver Willis post instead.

10 p.m. Wednesday UPDATE: Now there's a MUSIC VIDEO to the freakout dance mix. THANK YOU, GOD!

7:30 a.m. Thursday UPDATE: Here's Colbert's own historical meltdown (with the O'Reilly tape tacked on at the end for comparison?)...

Splimerick No. 1

This year, as in previous festivals, we'll be writing and collecting haikus about the Spoleto festival (Spo-kus) over at Janet's Spoleto Today blog. But we're adding a new challenge the year: Spoleto limericks (or, of course, "Splimericks").

Here's my first, which probably doesn't belong where people of taste, class and discernment might be exposed to such vulgarity:

A singer who hailed from St. Bart
released a bun-flapping loud fart
"Twas not me let that thing!"
the young man he did sing,
"it was placed in the score by Mozart!"

To send us your Splimericks and Spo-kus, e-mail them to Janet and the gang.

Where does Google go next?

A bit away from recent Xark topics, but "there are no unrelated topics", right?

A friend of mine recently sent some commentary on the future of Google.  This provoked more of a rant than I usually indulge so I thought I'd post it here:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/09/technology/where_does_google_go.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008051205

 

I'm amazed at how many "business experts" who write for the papers seem to want cool little startups to become IBM.  I've worked at IBM.  "I" doesn't stand for "Innovation", despite the number of patents they file.  "I" stands for "Inertia".  Inertia can be useful, but don't mistake it for something else.

As an example of their business acumen, these commentators write things like:

As an example, the company spends at least $14 per employee per day on all that free food. At 19,000 employees, that works out to $67 million a year, or about 20 cents per share that would drop to the bottom line if Google were to have the temerity to ask its workers - shudder - to pay for their own meals. Twenty cents is a trifle; analysts expect 2008 earnings of nearly $20 per share. But in a pinch? No-brainer.

So, let's analyze that:  Let's say an average employee costs a fully burdened $85/hr.  (That's a substantial but not outrageous fully-burdened salary+bennies in a small company in MA..  I'm sure the numbers are slightly different in Silicon Valley.)

Therefore, Google pays employees an extra 9.8 minutes per day.  Do you think they make that back?  Somehow I suspect they do.  They might, actually - shudder - recover 20 minutes per day in travel to and from lunch.  No, of course travel time doesn't come out of the company time -- they get their 8 hours anyway.  But would they like 8.15?  How about 8.3?  It also encourages employees to eat together.  It's amazing what problems get solved over food.  Was that time work time or lunch time? If the company benefits it's certainly worth paying for.

At 20 minutes "extra" per day for $14, Google would be achieving an ROI of 102%.  And this Super Genius says, cutting that is an "no-brainer". I agree, that would indeed be a "no-brain" decision, and I'm ignoring the whole "work environment" type benefits. 

The other thing these guys like to insult is the whole lack of central control.  They view it as "It's time to grow up, kids" and give examples of all the waste lack of control engenders.  Obviously, the guys who are supposed to be in charge don't know what they're doing -- otherwise they'd obviously be telling people exactly what to do and when.

"You can't manage what you can't control"  is quite true.  But perhaps there are other forms of control than "allocation of resources" as taught first thing in MBA schools. Perhaps the people in charge at Google aren't actually *ignorant* of business management, they just disagree.

Perhaps a leader might engage minds and say "we're moving in that direction".  Is that control?  I think so.  In fact, I think it's *more* control than allocating resources.  If you get people enrolled in an idea and a goal you don't *have* to spend your time micro-managing.  Think JFK's space race.  Think of the X-prize competition.

In reality, the central planning style of control has some benefits and some drawbacks (I've recently been working with a bunch of Russians who came of age under the Soviet Union -- you should hear *them* talk about central planning).  With central planning, you theoretically don't waste resources competing with yourself.  It's easier to set and uphold some standards.  Of course, you can often waste resources getting it wrong or following a central planners personal pet project or political agenda.  As for standards, sometimes they're a good idea, sometimes not.

Non-central planning results in waste of resources, failures of coordination and self-competition, but it means that when you get someone convinced to move in a direction, they are doing it because they think it's the right thing to do.  Besides, people doing the work (e.g. the Gmail team) might just have a wee bit more knowledge about how things work and in which direction they're moving than the central planning committee.  Perhaps, once upon a time the wee little worker peons couldn't see the big picture.  Now they can (ahem) Google it up.

Ultimately, if you look at companies as an ecosystem and apply some "survival of the fittest", projects under a "consensus" decision model might be starved by other projects, or killed or out-competed by other projects.  That doesn't happen in a central control company -- in a central control company, the whole company is starved or out-competed by another company.  That is, surely, a more efficient use of resources, right?

One thing these commentators glimpse, however, is how difficult it is to attract and retain good people as a company grows.  They like to attribute it to a company no longer being dynamic and attractive.  If a company has been following their advice, I'm sure that's true. However, a great deal of the problem isn't about "already done that" -- it is about sheer size. 

At 19,000 people, Google is a statistical approximation of the universe.  Variance from average is harder and harder the larger you get.  Of course, if Google acted like every other company they'd be, well, average, right?

Realistically, I don't think Google can make incremental changes towards being a "normal" company.  "Normal" is a different equilibrium point.  Google has found another, non-normal, equilibrium point.  If they move in small ways towards "Normal" they could seriously hurt themselves.

What Google has been doing for years -- and quite successfully -- is to create a blazing bonfire of creativity and productivity and then find a way to harness some of it as profit.  They use Internet scale harnesses and you don't fill that with regional scale energy.  The *have* to have a bonfire to sustain themselves.  They can fail 3 ways:  not being able to harness enough of the generated energy, not being able to generate enough energy to pull their harness, and the firewood budget growing too large for the harness to pull.

All of these projects -- even projects that "don't pay for themselves" -- contribute to the bonfire.  Do you take away the wood at the edges just because it's not contributing to the huge flames in the middle? If you do too much of that you'll have a mighty sorry bonfire.

Commentators such as this would have them place tight cost controls on their fire-wood budget.  If Google does that then they are dead -- there might be enough inertia to raise a new company from the ashes, it *won't* be the same company.

Google, intelligently, was offering a "blank check" for firewood -- as long as it keeps coming.

Husbands panicking on Mother's Day

Last week I worked with the page designer for Friday 5 to create a D.I.Y. Mother's Day card section, and then we uploaded some cards to my Friday 5 blog. There are different themes: Sentimental, Humorous, Little Kid, College Student, Husband. This morning I checked traffic just to see what was bringing people to the site, and found a common theme:

...Mothers%20Day%20Cards%20from%20Husband
...mothers%20day%20card%20from%20husband
...mothers%20day%20card%20downloadable%20from%20husband
...mother%27s%20day%20sentiments%20for%20wife
...mother%27s%20day%20sentiment%20wife
...what%20to%20write%20on%20your%20wifes%20mothers%20day%20card
...mother%27s%20day%20sentiment%20to%20wife
...mothers%20day%20cards%20husband%20to%20wife
...husband%20mother%20day%20card%20diy

Friday 5: For when you care enough to panic in the middle of the night and try to download a free piece of shit to cover your ass and keep you out of the doghouse.

Brooks sees what he wants to see

I'm going to keep talking about this because pundits (in this case, NYT syndicated columnist David Brooks) keep getting it wrong.

Brooks' latest contends that Republicans can't run "traditional" (i.e. negative, destructive, bullshit-focused) campaigns against Democrats this fall. He believes the GOP brand is so damaged right now that such campaigning will cause voters to choose "Not You." Which might be true.

But here's where Brooks steps on the rake (again):

"The extended primary season has changed the profile of Obama supporters..."

"Obama has a much more liberal profile than he did several weeks ago..."

...and so on.  Brooks is yet another media pundit who is deriving absolute trends from sequential primaries and then generating causal outcomes from the notion that time is a primary factor in the differences we find in state-to-state polling.

Let's put this another way: If we vote in South Carolina one week and they vote in South Dakota next week, extrapolating much of a trend between the two would be pure idiocy.

Granted, if pictures of Hillary Clinton engaging in an immoral act with Rush Limbaugh appeared during the South Carolina primary, that could have an affect on the South Dakota vote. But none of that would account for the states' pre-existing differences in demographics, economics, history and culture. 

People who use differences between sequential primaries as evidence for some trend aren't reading statistics and illuminating the public. They're bullshitting.

If life were like teh Interwebs

The best part? It's when CRACKED gets interrupted and Digg says "Go on."

Earth to Clinton: It's over

Is it really "no end in sight" for the Democratic primaries after last night's festivities? I'm not so sure. I think we may have crossed the line between "scrappy" and "delusional" sometime in the early morning hours, and people are waking up to that realization.

Yes it is over. The Clinton campaign found the people -- and bottom up campaigning too late I think. There is no math now. No case to win

-- Former 2004 Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, Tweeting at about 7:40 a.m.

Let people who want to believe its not over, believe its  not over. Its does not matter

--Trippi again, Tweeting at 8:26 a.m.

He's right, you know. Now we've just got to talk this up so that it enters the national consciousness strongly enough so that we bring this thing to closure. It's over. Pass it on.

UPDATE: Oh, and here's The Blogfather, who has really discovered his voice as a political journalist and analyst this year, chiming in with a Tweet at about roughly the same time as Trippi's.

The fact that HRC cancelled her media appearances this morning is a very good sign that she's going to get behind Obama now.

--Tech pioneer Dave Winer.

Let's talk this up. Get it out there. It's time.

UPDATE: I like the way Seth Godin put it this morning:

There isn't media bias in favor of Hillary ... Nor is there media bias in favor of floods. There's media bias in favor of drama.

Most of us are inclined to believe that government officials, doctors and the media are making an effort to tell us the truth. Actually, just like all marketers, they tell us a story.

Mainstream media coverage has tended to promote the sense that this is a dramatic, ongoing, close race -- a narrative that gives Clinton's continued candidacy legitimacy and makes us customers for their advertisers.

It's our job as citizens to cut through that narrative, and -- when necessary -- insert our own, corrective narrative, into the national discourse.

UPDATE 9:48 a.m.: HRC has added an event today, but let's not read too much into that yet. It says the internal discussions are ongoing -- no decision yet. If she didn't add an event this morning she'd create a vacuum and the MSM would fill that with speculation that she's out... effectively making the decision for her. Keep talking, keep Twittering...

A message to Tar Heels & Hoosiers

GOP geography

Another great forward from Sabine...

Where the hell are journalists?!

I've been busier than a one-armed paper hanger with work lately, mostly picking up the project left by a promoted co-worker, and getting together a plan for SpoletoToday.com. I hope that you guys will help support me in my endeavors on that site, but I'll whine and plead later. Today, I'm just pissed.

I am so angry over the failure of the national MSM to contribute anything AT ALL relevant, substantive or helpful to the presidential election coverage, I want to scream. Turn them off.  Don't buy their rags. Don't watch their shows. Don't listen to their hate-filled airwaves. The ridiculous obsession with drama and fitting events into a pre-conceived narrative BORDERS ON TREASON.

Yes, them's fightin' words. And I mean them.  Treason: 3.the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.

What else can you call the utter abandonment of  the principles of  the constitutionally established free press?  I say our trust has been betrayed. Have we any confidence that independent observers will uncover what the dishonest want to keep hidden? That they will vigorously illuminate  attempts by corporations and government officials to subvert the principles we profess to hold so dear? How is that failure to uphold a fundamental tenet of democracy anything short of a "breach of faith?"

You want to claim the mantle of  "journalist" with the rights and freedoms included therein? Then you better by God understand that with it comes a responsibility and a humility to at least factor in some notion of service  to something more than your paycheck and your next book deal.

How many so-called reporters and TV commentators are using the positions and authority granted them  by the people to fufill their duties? Is there anyone in the national MSM disseminating information that's accurate and relevant and vital to the country's well-being? The Washington Post.  Sometimes the New York Times. The rest are  focus on bullshit like Rev. Wright and Britney and f'n Ben Stein. Manufactured controversy when the foundations of our country are being chipped away.

You think that's overdramatic? Have I got a list for you. The defining truth about modern media is what they choose not to cover. The questions they fail to ask. Here's what they should be talking about. Here are the issues we should be demanding that  Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain address...

The Empire Strikes Barack!

Cockroach Vision

D oodle from some time ago (months? Years?) found yesterday on the back page of a legal pad.

Does Anyone Live in the South?